If you’re not yet using Marketing Stream to pull your Amazon Ads API data, here are a few reasons you may want to consider incorporating it:

- Real-Time data: If you run your pipeline at, say, midnight PST, and you use standard API reports, the data (most notably the Ad Sales data) will become ‘stale’ as the day goes on.

In other words, if you have client-facing data, and don’t use Marketing Stream, as time goes on throughout the day, Ad Console figures will continuously grow further from what your reporting displays. I have personally seen deltas of up to 6% in some cases...

This to me is the real benefit of real-time data – the ability to keep your database in sync with the Ad Console database.

- Smaller pipeline footprint: One API request to create the Subscription, vs nightly requests for multiple report requests.

Pulling data for dozens of brands can cause a pipeline to run for a long time, especially if the API is causing issues (reports expiring, excessive throttling, etc), and with Marketing Stream, this goes away.

- Advanced placements data: The concept of incorporating Placements into Bid Ops (decreasing bids to then increase Placements based on performance per Placement) is OK in theory. The major problem, specifically with SP Targets, is that we don’t have the performance per Placement at the Target level, unless you are using Marketing Stream...

If you're not using Marketing Stream’s data to make Placement adjustments with Bid Ops, then it forces you to get ‘artistic’ with your numbers - something I personally try to avoid…

Some things to also factor in:
- The amount of data you are working with is multiples higher compared to the standard V3 API reports – I recommend using Snowflake or data stores to work more efficiently with the data.
- When using hourly data for bid ops, you must factor in time-zones (the data comes in hourly, but the time-zone for that data is not always the same)
- You will want to always keep in mind that sales data attributes to the date and hour of the click, and not the purchase

If you have any questions or comments on Marketing Stream, feel free to reach out 😊